When HTML came out, it was purely academic. People said sure, it's cool, but how could you ever make money from just text with pictures and little links?
Now we have the answer: you create content -- text, video, pictures, games, etc -- that actively interacts with the user. Then, if you're smart, you make it so they have to "visit" your site to see this content, and, once there, they can only see whatever you choose. It's called a walled garden. All is beauty and loveliness. As long as you stay within the walls and don't piss off the gardener.
But this idea of "visiting" a site is only there because people type some text into a navigation bar and the browser loads material from a certain server. There's no reason or law that says I have to type in an address -- or that once I type in an address I am limited to seeing things from one server only. There's not even a reason I should see the information in some certain format or another. Why not type in "weather" and see various weather forecasts put out by various sources? After all, I want weather, not Joe's weather or Amit's weather. With all due respect to Joe and Amit, weather is weather.
Google is already doing this, of course, but only as a gateway. And they've got their own walled garden they're working on. Play by the rules and you'll appear on Google -- exactly where we want and alongside ads we feel are relevant to your page (and ads we make money from)
But what if you took the "location" idea completely away from HTML? Then you wouldn't be "visiting" anybody's site, and there wouldn't be any gardens to build. What if you simply interacted semantically with your computer and it gathered information from various sources and condensed it into plain text for you to consume? Gone would be "site stickiness", "addictive gaming", and "landing pages" and all sorts of other nonsense that's grown up around the idea of internet locations.
You could still consume multimedia and interactive material, of course, but only under terms you set, not terms the various site owners set. Perhaps you would want no ads, or no hyperlinks, or a time limit each day that would be acceptable for you to play games.
This puts the user back in control of their internet activities, the way it should be. It destroys many business models, but the internet is data-based, and it must evolve. I do not want the same internet in 2050 as we have now. It also gets back to the true meaning of HTML -- separating the data from the presentation. The designers of HTML realized that the purpose was structuring the data so that it relevantly linked, not creating a walled amusement park in the form of Facebook.
The curating and presentation of data is inherently a personal matter and best not left to others. We either fix this problem or it will continue to get worse, as recent events keep showing.
What is being said is something on the lines of there being no URL so to speak. So when you type facebook.com what is it the reason that got you to type that? Most probably being able to see "pics from the party last night".
Now imagine if the pics were distributed on Facebook, Flickr and Picasa along with a few tweets that I had made and pics added via TwitPic. Do you still think Facebook.com is what you should type?
Now think of a setup where the thing to be typed is "username: pics of the part last night /twitter facebook flickr picasa"
Gone is the idea of any advertisement and revenue model based on the content's location/web page.
Hm? Those pics (and their backup) would consume disk space and bandwidth. Obviously the huge majority of ppl prefers to see some ads instead of paying the cloud expenses.
Facebook screws over developers because they can. Expect more of it. From lots of other vendors.
The reason they screw developers and consumers over is because of the way we access the internet, using a browser, an URL, and a single-site "visit" metaphor. We are programmers, though. We are free to redefine how we access the internet any time we like. We have created our own prison.
I agree with you that this doesn't seem to be leading us towards a great utopia.
The problem isn't just programmers creating their own prison though - it's about business models. How do we create this seamless brand-free info sphere and still get paid?
History is a slippery beast. We only understand the past in terms of what we know in the present. To change the future, we have to build it now. If we spend our time trying understand the past before we act, time will have moved on without us.
I don't understand. How can a company that doesn't intermediate the web browsing experience screw developers over if they are free to add a new site to the Web at will? You don't need a relationship with Facebook to run a web site.
We're still a good distance from having the kind of intelligent agents that would be needed to implement your vision (which isn't strictly your vision, I remember reading about this sort of stuff over a decade ago in science fiction books!).
Certainly this would be an interesting world to live in, but so far the only entity which has enough processing power to figure out what you want and act as your intelligent agent is, in fact, Google. Even with Moore's law it might take a while before everyone can have a googleplex in their iPad.
I think you're trying to solve the generic problem -- how can I speak and have things magically delivered to me?
That, of course, is a long, long way from here. But I don't think we need to boil the ocean. Fact is, you could make 10 or 20 categories of things folks do on the internet and cover a huge chunk of activity. As one commenter pointed out, lots of folks want pictures of folks from the party last night, not "facebook". There's no reason you couldn't have a handheld device (or program) that you pushed a button and it showed you recent pictures from your friends -- no matter where they posted them online.
If you wanted to get ambitious, you might could come up with 100 use-cases that would cover an enormous amount of online activity: checking my account balances, hearing from friends, sharing pictures or videos, providing feedback on what I thought after consuming some kind of material, etc. I'd be willing to be such a list would be so complete that's it's not important about the remaining items. You'd simply use a browser and an URL for those.
I bet you could create a device with 20 or so buttons that would cover so much common activity on the net as to make the device useful as a stand-alone appliance.
The beauty of this, of course, is that since people's behavior is more or less unchanged (people have been sharing pictures with each other ever since there was photography) the same buttons could be easily learned and would work no matter what the underlying technology or transport mechanism was.
There are two reasons that come to mind immediately.
First, legally you can't use one online service to aggregate from other services -- every walled garden has clear TOS that prevent this. You can, however do the gathering and processing locally. After all, you own your own computer equipment and are solely responsible for how data is collected and presented there.
Secondly, and more importantly because of the history, you're trying to solve the problem using the constraints and assumptions that created the problem to begin with. You can't fix seven walled gardens -- by creating yet another walled garden.
Stand-alone targeted web apps are great for finding needs and servicing markets, but the nature of the net is monopolistic. That's why many of these stand-alones end up getting flipped. We need to break the technical backbone that keeps creating monopolies if we really want to get rid of them.
> This puts the user back in control of their internet activities, the way it should be.
Why should the user be in solely in control of how a content producer's material is consumed? The vision you reference scares me a bit: We've already got a "race to the bottom" among manual laborers in the world, now we're looking to dedifferentiate and disempower our content producers as well? If I put effort into writing a movie review, I think it's reasonable to expect some control over how it is consumed (e.g., people look at ads that benefit me, pay me, or maybe just come look at my website with a pretty picture of my face to make me feel special).
Don't get me wrong: I like having some freedom in how I use content. I like having my music unencumbered by DRM to use on any current or future device I might buy. I like using Google Reader to keep my finger on the pulses of all of my hobbies. But I also sympathize with publishers about the Kindle DRM (and laud Amazon's attempts to make my Kindle content available on lots of platforms and devices) and with websites that just put a quick blurb or title in their RSS feed to force me to come to their site if I am interested.
Sadly, I haven't yet heard a proposal for how content should work in the future that strikes the right balance. We seem to have publishers pushing toward extreme inflexibility and "freedom" advocates pushing towards (what you describe) a situation that diminishes any benefits (financial or otherwise) of content production. I hope we can find a way to empower content producers while providing users with flexible (though, probably not entirely unencumbered or "free") ways of consuming content. The status quo, even with its annoying ads and restrictions, seems better to me than either of the extremes.
> You could still consume multimedia and interactive material, of course, but only under terms you set, not terms the various site owners set. Perhaps you would want no ads, or no hyperlinks, or a time limit each day that would be acceptable for you to play games.
What incentive do people have to create content with such a system? Altruism is fine, but content creators need to pay rent.
I worked on something a little while ago that was similar - allowing people to mash arbitrary content together - but abandoned it because of the hassle of trying to prevent it being used for leeching.
When HTML came out, it was purely academic. People said sure, it's cool, but how could you ever make money from just text with pictures and little links?
Now we have the answer: you create content -- text, video, pictures, games, etc -- that actively interacts with the user. Then, if you're smart, you make it so they have to "visit" your site to see this content, and, once there, they can only see whatever you choose. It's called a walled garden. All is beauty and loveliness. As long as you stay within the walls and don't piss off the gardener.
But this idea of "visiting" a site is only there because people type some text into a navigation bar and the browser loads material from a certain server. There's no reason or law that says I have to type in an address -- or that once I type in an address I am limited to seeing things from one server only. There's not even a reason I should see the information in some certain format or another. Why not type in "weather" and see various weather forecasts put out by various sources? After all, I want weather, not Joe's weather or Amit's weather. With all due respect to Joe and Amit, weather is weather.
Google is already doing this, of course, but only as a gateway. And they've got their own walled garden they're working on. Play by the rules and you'll appear on Google -- exactly where we want and alongside ads we feel are relevant to your page (and ads we make money from)
But what if you took the "location" idea completely away from HTML? Then you wouldn't be "visiting" anybody's site, and there wouldn't be any gardens to build. What if you simply interacted semantically with your computer and it gathered information from various sources and condensed it into plain text for you to consume? Gone would be "site stickiness", "addictive gaming", and "landing pages" and all sorts of other nonsense that's grown up around the idea of internet locations.
You could still consume multimedia and interactive material, of course, but only under terms you set, not terms the various site owners set. Perhaps you would want no ads, or no hyperlinks, or a time limit each day that would be acceptable for you to play games.
This puts the user back in control of their internet activities, the way it should be. It destroys many business models, but the internet is data-based, and it must evolve. I do not want the same internet in 2050 as we have now. It also gets back to the true meaning of HTML -- separating the data from the presentation. The designers of HTML realized that the purpose was structuring the data so that it relevantly linked, not creating a walled amusement park in the form of Facebook.
The curating and presentation of data is inherently a personal matter and best not left to others. We either fix this problem or it will continue to get worse, as recent events keep showing.